Text mining of bankruptcy information using formal concept analysis

A lot of information concerning the status of companies are available on the Web. However, a simple search of documents does not explain the meaning or the cause the status. Semantical interpretation and hypotheses generation are necessary for further analysis. This paper proposes a method to analyse the cause and the situation of bankruptcy with respect to particular condition that a user can specify as a query. The method is based on the theory of formal concept analysis. The novelty of the method is in (a) that sentences are considered as objects and words are considered as attributes and (b) that a concise subgraph of the concept lattice is introduced and used to guess the cause. Two cases of interactive and iterative process are shown where a user proceeds from a simple query to a new hypothesis, which would not be able to found by a naive cross tabulation or keyword extraction.